Equipment for the sport of bowling has made great advances. Bowling balls are now made of technically superior cores that by their design, can produce and alter the balls travel characteristics; the cores covered at the outer most surface of the ball by various materials such as hard rubber, plastic, polyurethanes, and other synthetics all designed to accommodate the ball to any lane conditions. Thus, a superior sports apparatus is presented to every bowler.
The task of mating the appropriate ball to a bowler is in the hands of the person who actually drills the holes in the ball that receive the bowler's fingers, by which the ball is firmly gripped. In spite of the fact that all the drilling is expertly done, in an apparatus that is exquisitely technically made, and in many instances by the same driller, every bowler from the level of the professional to the weekend social bowler will too often be heard to remark, "All my bowling balls feel different." The problem is that it is almost impossible to standardize a "feel" regardless of how good a driller and his/her equipment may be. Therefore, the real problem lies at the exact interface of the bowler's fingers and the drilled holes of the ball, for regardless of how technically well designed the ball, how many wrist splints, gloves and other accessories are employed, the bowler will not achieve the goal of bowling his/her personal best unless the ball when gripped and released has the consistent "right feel" and is pain-free regardless of which of his bowling balls the bowler uses. The key, then is standardization, the question is "how", when every bowler's fingers are different.
Without reciting a litany of all the inventors of prior art who tried to solve the problem of bowler-ball interface by using finger inserts placed into the drilled holes of the bowling ball and regardless of how the prior art inserts were technically designed and manufactured, they appear to have all had the same common characteristic in that they all tried to adapt a non-anatomically shaped insert to a constantly changing anatomical body part. Essentially, almost all prior art inserts are either round or oval in the actual contact chamber receiving the finger that is never always consistently round or oval, therefore, the only recourse was to grind down the part of the round or oval shape that produced pain and take on the impossible task of exactly reproducing the grind down shape "that works" for every single ball a particular bowler owns to achieve a "consistent feel".
The present invention offers a solution to the problem of mismatch of a non-anatomically shaped insert to a constantly changing anatomical body part, by not trying to stereotype the shape of the insert, but by embracing the constantly changing anatomical shape. Once the specific finger shape is precisely defined, it can then be incorporated within the cylindrical shape of the drill hole and inserted into the ball. With the original anatomical shape precisely defined and recorded, it can be duplicated ad infinatum and placed into every bowling ball a bowler has thus achieving the long sought after goal of standardizing the "right feel" uniquely and specifically for each and every bowler.